I’ve had a lot of success with a niche website recently. It made me realize a few crucial things about niche -
- If you pick a niche that you are passionate about - then writing about the niche and researching it is fun, you’re at an instant advantage.
- If the niche is sufficiently small, perhaps sports shoes, there is going to be little to no real competition. Yes, there may be a lot of people writing about sports shoes once a month. There might be a lot of stores selling sports shoes. However, no one, and I do mean no one is going to be approaching it with the passion and single minded focus you bring.
- Right from the get go, you want to establish these two advantages i.e. passion, and lack of quality competition. Which brings us to the third advantage you should aim for i.e.
- Intercepting the Future - you want to try and start a website or blog before something becomes popular or well established. This will not always be possible - however, if it is, then go for it.
- All of this becomes useless, if you don’t have a market - so figure out if the niche you’re interested in has a market. If you try out google adwords keyword tool, you’ll see that millions of people every month search for mens shoes, a few hundred thousand for sports shoes, and so forth. So the market is there.
- Now figure out whether this is traffic of good intent - Are these people actually buying things? Advertiser competition is a good measure. BTW if you copy and paste the table from Google Adwords Keyword Tool you’ll see the prices people are paying for each keyword.
- Now we’re ready to proceed.
This brings us to the actual execution phase. Sleep over your idea for at least 2 nights before proceeding. This is to make sure that you really do want to do this, and its not a transitory feeling.
Preparation and Launch
- Figure out the top 3-10 keyword phrases you want to target.
- Try and find a PR3 or higher domain with 1 or 2 of your main keywords. Only .com domains.
- Register it for 2 years.
- Pick what you’ll use - self coded, wordpress, a forum, something else.
Actual Day to Day
- Don’t use any directories. Don’t buy any links.
- Post every single day.
- Around 300 words is a good sized post.
- A combination of 2-3 shorter posts and 1-2 longer high quality posts is a good mix.
- Make sure you’re having fun and writing about stuff you like - else quit.
After a month, take a look at your statistics from a 3rd person perspective. If you picked your niche well, you should be getting a lot of good intent traffic. Now it’s time to figure out what to use - Google Adwords, Affiliate Marketing, Amazon, eBay.
I’ll add more later …